Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders Twitter-battled over the nature of liberalism

Was Clinton's team feeling the Bern?

Two days after the Iowa Democratic caucus in which Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders by a razor-thin margin, the candidates were shaking hands and kissing babies in the run-up to the New Hampshire primary, but the real action was on Twitter.

The two rivals for the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential nomination—or, rather, their social-media teams—spent much of the day sniping at each other on the microblogging service about which of them was a true progressive.

It began when MSNBC political correspondent Kasie Hunt asked the Vermont independent senator if he considered the former secretary of state a “progressive.”

https://twitter.com/aseitzwald/status/694635486481141761

Clinton—well, technically, her web team—took offense to this remark and used the opportunity to subtly highlight the narrative of the former New York senator as a seasoned Beltway veteran who knows how to pull the levers of power to accomplish complex policy goals—in contrast to her opponent, whose idealism, they suggested, isn’t tempered by practicality.

Incidentally, liberals used to call themselves “liberals” instead of “progressives,” but then they started using “progressive” because the word “liberal” no longer polled well due to a decades-long campaign by conservatives to turn it into a pejorative.

Sanders’s team then posted the video describing Clinton’s progressivism as intermittent at best.

“I think, frankly, it is very hard to be a real progressive and to take on the establishment in a way that, I think, it has to be taken [on], when you become dependent as she has, through her super PAC and other ways, on Wall Street and drug company money,” he said.

Clinton’s people, keen to pick up as much liberal support as possible, fired back with a list of her progressive accomplishments over the years, then posted a video of Clinton listing even more of those accomplishments.

The former secretary of state’s web team then highlighted Sanders’s relatively pro-gun voting record, at least in comparison to her own, among other facts intended to worry the left-leaning Democratic base while positioning Clinton as above the fray of ideological purity.

1) This shouldn't be a debate about who gets to define "progressive"—it should be about who will get real results for American families.

Aaron Sankin is a former Senior Staff Writer at the Daily Dot who covered the intersection of politics, technology, online privacy, Twitter bots, and the role of dank memes in popular culture. He lives in Seattle, Washington. He joined the Center for Investigative Reporting in 2016.